The Dutch Iraq Report – No Mandate, No Introspection

Posted on January 15th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: International Terrorism, ISIM/RU Research, Religious and Political Radicalization.

The Netherlands joined the US as part of the Iraq Stabilization Force (SFIR) in the province of Al-Muthanna in Southern Iraq until March 2005. From the start there were requests for an official inquiry into the government’s decision to support the US during the invasion (politically, not military). These requests were based upon doubts about the legal basis for the war. The report was published this week and more or less destroys the Dutch argument for supporting the invasion. This support was based upon Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply with UN resolutions and because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. This argument was flawed from the onset since the objective of the US and the UK was regime change; as a small country it makes no sense to have other aims and arguments for an invasion of which you do not support its main objective.

Chairman David’s presentation of the report is very clear (download it here, it has a large English summary). The Dutch loyalty with the US and UK took precedence over the need to ensure the legality of the invasion. There was no UN mandate for the attack according to the committee:
BBC News – Dutch inquiry says Iraq war had no mandate

It said “the wording of [UN Security Council] Resolution 1441 cannot reasonably be interpreted as authorising individual member states to use military force”.

Iraq’s alleged breach of Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations”, was used by the coalition, and the Netherlands, to justify its invasion.

However, a memo from the time by Dutch foreign ministry lawyers, subsequently leaked, suggested the war was in fact illegal under international law.

The inquiry said there was no evidence to support rumours that the Dutch military took part in the invasion.

Dutch PM Balkenende initially refuted all the main (negative) conclusions of the report and supported the positive ones, but later had to back away.
The alliance and loyalty with the US and UK led to a political tunnelvision in which information that countered their goals and intentions was ignored and (as importantly) not shared with parliament.

Not part of the inquiry, but part of my research has been the role of the invasion in Iraq (and the whole trajectory leading up to it) in the identification of Muslim youth with the idea of global Muslim ummah and Jihad in Iraq. The invasion was important in at least two ways:
1) Jihadi propagandists published texts, leaflets and videos about atrocities against Iraqi’s, Afghani’s and other Muslims elsewhere and, moreover, linked them with perceived injustice against Muslims in Europe for example by Dutch politicians attacking Islam (Hirsi Ali, Wilders, Van Gogh). In strong compelling images and words they connected seemingly different cases to eachother under the header of War against Islam (see also Nesser, subs).
2) The attack on Iraq took place from March 20 to 1 May 2003. Also in the period the Arab European League (AEL), a militant Belgian organization of ‘angry’ and ‘proud’ Muslim youth (see here Van der Welle), trying to set up shop in the Netherlands, failed to appoint a leader in April 2003. The intended leader refused after a controversy of his alledged radical views and the newly appointed board wasn’t strong enough to cope with the external pressure by press and security agencies. The failure of this democratic, albeit controversial and militant, organization combined with the (then already) flawed democratic process leading up to the invasion, led to two related conclusions among Dutch radicals about democracy: 1) Democracy is not an effective way for Muslims to claim compensation for their grievances and, even worse b) the democratic process is detrimental for Islam and Muslims.

See also Muqtedar Khan and John L. Esposito. Part of this is rhetoric, but rhetoric doesn’t mean it is any less ‘real’. The anger and disillusionment among parts of the Muslim youth at that time in 2003 can not be overemphasized; it laid the foundation for a trajectory of radicalization leading up to the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004. Interestingly, but not suprising, is that the Dutch decision of going to Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for the US is hardly ever considered in counter-radicalization reports and plans rendering the Dutch state blind for all kinds of transnational aspects of Muslim youth’s lifeworlds. You don’t have to be a Muslim radical, or a radical or a Muslim to criticize the state of affairs in the past. But that almost 7 years after still no introspection takes place shows most of all that the tunnelvision still exists: the whole Iraq war is reduced to a matter of international laws and agreements.

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Islam and Media & Islam in the Media

Posted on January 15th, 2010 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

It is really impossible to attend all conferences and sometimes you have to skip the really interesting ones. This was the case with the Islam and The Media conference organized by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. In the past I have written several things about Dutch Muslim youth on the Internet focussing on the period between 2001 and 2005. I focused their on internet practices and attempted to connect their online and offline practices (you can read the ISET Working Paper HERE). In my current research on Salafi youth internet plays a role but I have tried to integrate it in the whole research approach (including methodology) while my colleague Carmen (who did attend the conference) focuses on knowledge practices and user genres in relation to activism and internet.

One of the interesting aspects of the conference was the use of Twitter at #IMC. I haven’t been on Twitter that long (a few weeks…) and I still have hard time finding out what the use of it is. Keeping up with breaking news is certainly one of the benefits, but I also found out another one. One of the participants, Linda Duits, was twittering about the conference and mentioned the presentation of Wilders’ movie Fitna (see my analysis HERE). I asked her about it (she was not the presenter) and one hour later I had the presentation in my email box. So maybe Twitter and me will work out in the end after all.

From another colleague I heard about the lack of attention by journalists (and policy makers?) for this conference. This is not new although I keep being surprised about it. Given the attention in media circles and policy circles for the internet in relation to radicalization of Muslim youth (see Huffington Post, CBS 60 minutes and Reuters) one would expect media would be interested in a conference such as IMC. Stewart Hoover (Director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture and author of several publications on media and religion, including the very inspiring Mass Media Religion, The Social Sources of the Electronic Church and Religion in the Media Age) picks up the same issue at his blog responding to a NPR’s Morning Edition story on online Jihadism:

Islam and the Media « StewartHoover’s Blog

So you can see how I might find it ironic that, just a few days after it concluded, NPR chose to give major attention to Islam and the media with no reference either to our meeting or to the kind of scholarship presented there. Now, of course I am not naive about news processes and news values, so am not really surprised. But there is a lesson in this.

What was the NPR story about? It was about “online jihadism” and referred specifically to the recent CIA assassination in Afghanistan and the way the perpetrator is being remembered in some places online. This means that, in spite of all the good scholarship out there that is helping us understand the range of ways that media and mediation are inflecting Islam, the primary media framing is still around terror and security. That, we continue to learn, is the “real story.” If they had attended the meeting, they would have received a much deeper understanding of many of the questions they asked in their story (and that their interviewee could only speculate about). They wanted to know a lot about both the production and reception of online jihadist material. Scholars present at our conference brought important insights into these matters and could have helped broaden and deepen public understanding of the implications of what is happening online.

Hoover argues that the security angle is important but that that is only part of the story. One of the things lacking in media (and among policy makers) is an analysis of the reception of online messages. Much of the analyses seems to be based on the assumption that the internet (and the texts and videos on it) are contagious and that radicalization is contagious too; combined the constitue an ‘explosive’ mixture. This is usually based on written statements of (former) Jihadis. An analysis that takes up the issue of reception by the audience and that also includes facts from lifestories of the people behind the online nicknames is important because otherwise online statements are (partly) taken out of (offline) context but also out of an online context because usually there is an online history behind these messages (of the arguments my colleague Carmen makes). A next step of course is how to convince journalists (looking for stories that makes sense to the public) that an interdisciplinary view is necessary, as Hoover correctly argues? Certainly blogging is one thing as I have stated before. This will be one of the issues that will be explored during an international workshop later this year (if everything works out). Will be continued…

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